Page 217 of The Seven Rings
“Yeah, it is. Just a little surprising.”
By the time she made coffee, toasted a bagel, Trey’s prediction proved true. The snow vanished as quickly as Jerome, and the sun shot through the clouds.
Trey came down when she let the pets back in. She calculated he’d managed to shower, shave, dress like a lawyer going to court in just under thirty minutes.
And she found it mildly annoying.
She got him coffee anyway.
“Thanks.”
“Since it’ll take me about twice the time it took you to look presentable, I’m going up to get ready for my video conference.”
“You’ll hit way over presentable.”
She considered. “Mostly mollified. I saw Jerome.”
Trey lowered the mug of coffee. “Where?”
“By the shed, putting the wheelbarrow away. The dogs obviously know him because they ran over to him, didn’t bark, just ran over so he’d pet them. And he did. Then he, you know.” She gestured. “Tipped his cap and vanished.”
She shrugged. “I was going to say just another manor morning, but you look… I’m going to call it concerned.”
“It’s a kind of escalation.”
Now that concern puzzled her. “I think—hope—it’s that they’re all getting more comfortable with me. With us. And that we’re all getting stronger. Don’t you?”
“I can go with that.” He walked over to look out at the shed. “That’s the plus side of it.”
“And the minus?”
“Dobbs pushes harder. And she has been. Having that vulture of hers attack the studio windows, the bolt of lightning, trapping you downstairs. She’s escalating, too.”
“It hasn’t done her much good so far.”
He turned back to her. “I think about that first day, and how I was half amused about how you might react to finding out you’d inherited a haunted house. Benignly haunted, so I thought. And I wonder, if I’d known all of this, what I’d have done differently. If I’d sat with you at that table and told you all of this, what you’d have done differently.”
So he carried that, she realized. And shouldn’t. The best way to ease that weight, to her mind, would be plain and simple truth.
“First, I wouldn’t have believed you. Most likely, since we’d just met, I’d have been polite about it. But I’d have thought: So the hot, flannel-shirt-wearing lawyer is a little bit crazy.”
“I can be pretty persuasive.”
“I’ve noticed. And I can be pretty determined.”
“Also noted.”
He stepped toward her, freshly shaved, lawyer suit and tie, all that black hair not quite tamed. And a world of trouble in his eyes.
“If it were an option, Sonya, I’d pack you up and get you out of here. This house means a lot to me, too, but you mean a hell of a lot more.”
“It’s not just the manor, Trey.”
“I know that, and still. It’s just a feeling, a bad one, but there’s something building, something coming. There’s a chance we could head it off.”
“You want to go back in that room.”
“It’s a chance to stop it. To stop her.”
